BY FABIAN LEDGISTER, Staff Reporter
Motorists manoeuvre their way through the crowded intersection of Hope, West Kings House and Lady Musgrave roads, in St. Andrew, during an islandwide power outage, on Saturday. - Fabian Ledgister
WAS IT A series of lightning strikes that the Jamaica Public Service Company Ltd. (JPS) say may have caused Saturday's 'black-out', or was it sabotage as some members of the public have been claiming?
After spending most of Saturday night in 'pitch-black' darkness, many Jamaicans are speculating a connection between an all-island outage, and Atlanta-based Mirant Corporation's recent decision to sell their majority stakehold in the Jamaica Public Service Company Ltd.
The outage, which left the entire island in darkness from about 3:30 p.m. until some time after midnight, has many persons wondering if 'sabotage' was behind the incident.
"Nothing like this hasn't happened in years to JPS without a hurricane or something, and as Mirant is announcing plans to sell JPS (majority stake in company), this jus happen?" queried a young engineering student.
"It simple man, di JPS people dem bruk, an dem nah pay workers, suh dem sabotage di man dem," surmised a taxi operator.
The company strongly refutes these claims however, citing them as "ridiculous".
"We can't stop people from speculating ... what we can assert is that it would be ridiculous for us to purposely do this. Of what interest would the JPS have in cutting power? When power isn't running we stop making money, so this did not help the JPS," said F. Anthony Ray, the company's director of external affairs.
The company held a press conference yesterday, at their headquarters in New Kingston, divulging what internal investigations had so far revealed.
"Our system records show that at approximately 4:16 p.m. and within a few seconds thereafter, three events took place ... within seconds, these three events triggered a cascading of the systems that resulted in the entire island," explained JPS Co.'s senior vice-president of customer operations, Tom Dorsey.
COINCIDENTAL
The three events that caused the system collapse, they say, were:
1. A trip (failure) on the Bogue-Duncans 69kv transmission line on the north-west coast.
2. A voltage collapse on significant parts of the power system.
3. The loss of power supply from two of our Independent Power Producers, Jamaica Private Power Company (JPPC), and Jamaica Energy Partners (JEP).
Although the power company say their investigations will reveal the factor(s) that triggered these "three cascading events", they offered one possible cause.
"We do know of reports around the island about some isolated lightening events. We had a number of our transmission lines that were hit with lightning, tripped off and were returned back to service ... so we had some events in the midday to 2:00 p.m. that may have some relation to the events," said Dorsey.
JPS was unable to explain the coincidental and virtually simultaneous failure of their systems, and their independent providers JPPC and JEP.
They say they made all effort to restore power to the island and claim that 25 per cent of the island had power returned five hours after the incident. An hour later, they say, 50 per cent of the island had power, and by 12:40 a.m., all power was restored.
The company says that they apologise for any inconvenience caused, and implore any customer that incurred losses as a direct result of the power outages to contact their customer service lines at 1-800-CALL-JPS, and send a detailed report of their losses.
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